Post by Dave on May 30, 2011 8:50:32 GMT -5
Downtown Utica. My mother told the story of walking through it early in the morning from Cornhill down to the Horrocks-Ibbotson factory on Whitesboro Street. After quitting high school in her junior year and going to work at Woolworth's for $17.50 a week full time, including Monday nights and Saturdays, Mom landed a great factory job that paid her $25 a week at age 17, enough for make-up and the occasional purchase of a party blouse to supplement her meager wardrobe.
Across Eagle Street and on to Genesee and down the full length of the hill she walked through the Busy Corner at 6:30 in the morning. Twenty years later I sometimes unknowingly retraced her route when I was secretly pocketing the bus fare she gave me to get to school. I saved it up to take a girl out for a soda after classes. I was an early romantic, it seems, as clueless as I was penniless.
In all kinds of weather Mom walked to her job. You don't need WIBX to tell you the weather, let alone the Internet and an interactive radar map display. You just carry an umbrella if it looks like rain. An umbrella in the summer and maybe an extra scarf in the winter makes a mockery of an entire Fortune 500 Weather Prediction Industry and those not-quite-ready-for-prime-time weather announcers. And that was especially true when you walked everywhere.
As Mom passed the Kresge's on the ground floor of the bank building on the corner of Elizabeth and Genesee Streets, a person walking toward her would have seen her framed by the stone and iron fence surrounding Grace Church, its steeple sweeping upward toward the last winking star in the early morning sky. Niesners beckoned up the street behind her to anyone with a nickel or a dime. The young man passing Mom saw a young woman in a threadbare coat, a tinker's daughter with a pugged nose and a sweet smile. In only a few years she would turn his head a second time as their paths crossed one evening while he walked up Park Ave. on his way to his induction into the Knights of Columbus.
Mom ignored the young man, her mind on more important matters. She had spent the first week of the new job practicing her craft, tying the little eyelets called line guides on to long bamboo fly fishing rods at the factory. There was a certain technique to it and the method involved a good eye, steady hands and the use of two small machines. Anything but mechancially inclined, Mom had busted two rods and tied horribly all week, but her boss and instructor seemed unperterbed, remarking at least three times that "anyone can do this, even you." He had meant to be encouraging.
This morning the production line boss would inspect her work and decide if she was good enough to "go on the line." If not she would be given another few days and then let go if she didn't improve. She wanted this job more than anything. It wasn't just the money, it was her pride. And she had to admit, there was a boy involved, too. She remembered him from St. Francis de Sales Church and he now worked at the factory. She wanted to be near him. For the rest of her life. It wasn't to be. She would live to age 76, yet seldom forget the boy. But he didn't live to see his 20th birthday. Mom never said anything about that awful afternoon she found him.
I discovered it in the newspaper files at the public library when I was in high school. I never spoke to her about it.
Past Woolworth's she continued to walk, an icy feeling in her heart as she remembered the man who used to stalk her on the job as she stood behind the drapery fabrics counter in the upstairs remote back corner of the building. He was the store's floorwalker and she had always been unsure of his intentions as he hovered not far away, too often she thought. Whether he suspected her of stealing or just liked to be near her she didn't know, but in any case she didn't like the man. He had a sick kind of aura about him. As she stepped off the curb into Bleecker Street this morning she was glad to no longer have to worry about his presence.
Past the new Boston Store and then across the Boulvedard made by filling in the old canal and then through the waning old business district of her father's era, the banks and businesses closing and moving up the street to be in the center of commerce. And finally the smoke stained dirt encrusted factory building now inhabited by The Horrocks-Ibbotson Fish Pole Factory, Inc. How lovely it seemed to her, how solid compared to the tinsel of Woolworth's. The workers and machines here inside H-I turned out thousands of fishing poles each week, certainly a noble and more useful endeavor than selling nickel and dime novelties. Why, without the fly fishing rods she was proud to help manufacture, how could anyone sit at the lunch counter in Kresge's and expect to order a tuna fish on rye?
an excerpt from a story I'm working on, "Jimmy B."
Across Eagle Street and on to Genesee and down the full length of the hill she walked through the Busy Corner at 6:30 in the morning. Twenty years later I sometimes unknowingly retraced her route when I was secretly pocketing the bus fare she gave me to get to school. I saved it up to take a girl out for a soda after classes. I was an early romantic, it seems, as clueless as I was penniless.
In all kinds of weather Mom walked to her job. You don't need WIBX to tell you the weather, let alone the Internet and an interactive radar map display. You just carry an umbrella if it looks like rain. An umbrella in the summer and maybe an extra scarf in the winter makes a mockery of an entire Fortune 500 Weather Prediction Industry and those not-quite-ready-for-prime-time weather announcers. And that was especially true when you walked everywhere.
As Mom passed the Kresge's on the ground floor of the bank building on the corner of Elizabeth and Genesee Streets, a person walking toward her would have seen her framed by the stone and iron fence surrounding Grace Church, its steeple sweeping upward toward the last winking star in the early morning sky. Niesners beckoned up the street behind her to anyone with a nickel or a dime. The young man passing Mom saw a young woman in a threadbare coat, a tinker's daughter with a pugged nose and a sweet smile. In only a few years she would turn his head a second time as their paths crossed one evening while he walked up Park Ave. on his way to his induction into the Knights of Columbus.
Mom ignored the young man, her mind on more important matters. She had spent the first week of the new job practicing her craft, tying the little eyelets called line guides on to long bamboo fly fishing rods at the factory. There was a certain technique to it and the method involved a good eye, steady hands and the use of two small machines. Anything but mechancially inclined, Mom had busted two rods and tied horribly all week, but her boss and instructor seemed unperterbed, remarking at least three times that "anyone can do this, even you." He had meant to be encouraging.
This morning the production line boss would inspect her work and decide if she was good enough to "go on the line." If not she would be given another few days and then let go if she didn't improve. She wanted this job more than anything. It wasn't just the money, it was her pride. And she had to admit, there was a boy involved, too. She remembered him from St. Francis de Sales Church and he now worked at the factory. She wanted to be near him. For the rest of her life. It wasn't to be. She would live to age 76, yet seldom forget the boy. But he didn't live to see his 20th birthday. Mom never said anything about that awful afternoon she found him.
I discovered it in the newspaper files at the public library when I was in high school. I never spoke to her about it.
Past Woolworth's she continued to walk, an icy feeling in her heart as she remembered the man who used to stalk her on the job as she stood behind the drapery fabrics counter in the upstairs remote back corner of the building. He was the store's floorwalker and she had always been unsure of his intentions as he hovered not far away, too often she thought. Whether he suspected her of stealing or just liked to be near her she didn't know, but in any case she didn't like the man. He had a sick kind of aura about him. As she stepped off the curb into Bleecker Street this morning she was glad to no longer have to worry about his presence.
Past the new Boston Store and then across the Boulvedard made by filling in the old canal and then through the waning old business district of her father's era, the banks and businesses closing and moving up the street to be in the center of commerce. And finally the smoke stained dirt encrusted factory building now inhabited by The Horrocks-Ibbotson Fish Pole Factory, Inc. How lovely it seemed to her, how solid compared to the tinsel of Woolworth's. The workers and machines here inside H-I turned out thousands of fishing poles each week, certainly a noble and more useful endeavor than selling nickel and dime novelties. Why, without the fly fishing rods she was proud to help manufacture, how could anyone sit at the lunch counter in Kresge's and expect to order a tuna fish on rye?
an excerpt from a story I'm working on, "Jimmy B."
